State Track Meet

The Texas high school state track meet is one of my favorite events of the year to shoot. We usually have about 40 or 50 kids competing over the two day meet. The days are long, we usually get there about 8 or 9 am and get done around 10 or 11pm. And by done I mean having sent all the photos for the next day's paper, I usually end up going back to my hotel taking a long cool shower, getting dinner then putting together a massive online slideshow for the web, since my deadline for that isn't as tight. I think this year's slideshows were around 40-50 per day. I got done Friday night/Saturday morning around 2am and took a long nap and got up and did it again on Saturday morning.

It gets pretty crazy sometimes trying to get photos of all the area competitors, and sometimes you miss things. I go into this with a couple goals when shooting this meet: First is to get as many of the local kids as possible, it's pretty embarrassing to have a local kid set a record and you don't have a shot. Second is don't take boring pictures and have fun!

The great part about having so many kids is you can have fun and experiment different techniques, if you miss a shot there are plenty more kids to shoot. While I try not to miss anything, it's a fact of life, it's probably going to happen, the key is to get more good shots than bad. As usual when I'm covering a sporting event, I look and kind of feel like a pack mule. I bring as many of the tools I can. The great thing about this meet is the press tent is at the top of the parking deck and my car is right outside the press tent, so I can have easy access to extra long glass, camera bodies, remotes, etc. I can leave in my car when I don't need it all.

Another important part is good communication with reporters, with everyone having cell phones it's a lot easier to keep in touch. It's a great way to have a second set of eyes on an event. When the discus is on one side of the stadium and the high jump on the other it never hurts to have someone keeping track of who is throwing/jumping when and when I need to be there or not, like if someone is jumping for a record or is one of the final two jumpers of the event, I need to be there instead of watching our discus kid on her second throw since she has four more to go.